Aligned Carbon

The world’s first supplier of aligned carbon nanotubes to enable 1000x improvement in computing.

Company Summary:

The computation demands for future abundant data applications will far exceed the capabilities of today’s technology roadmap because silicon CMOS has reached fundamental limits in power as well as architectural limits in memory access time. This is particularly harmful for mobile processors bound by energy constraints or hardware accelerators (e.g. for machine learning) limited by memory access bandwidth. A new computing paradigm based on monolithic 3D integration can overcome these limits. Carbon nanotube transistors integrated at low temperature on top of silicon CMOS provide a disruptive path for the implementation of monolithic 3D integration. For instance, an order of magnitude gains in efficiency and performance can be realized even when monolithic 3D integration using carbon nanotubes is paired with eight generations older CMOS process nodes (90 nm nodes with 3D integration benchmark at 10x faster than 7 nm nodes for silicon CMOS only). Experimental demonstrations of these large-scale monolithic 3D systems have recently been publicly announced.

To move this promising architecture out of academia and into industrial development there exists an unmet need for useful, commercially-available CNT materials that achieve the stringent requirements of the nanoelectronics industry. Aligned Carbon was formed to address this need and lead the effort to bring CNT materials into the nanoelectronics manufacturing realm.

Aligned Carbon has provided its product of wafer-scale aligned carbon nanotube arrays to more than a dozen university research groups and industrial research labs. We have gained further traction by selling wafers to a validating customer in the nanoelectronics industry and are negotiating a long term sales contract with a major integrated circuit manufacturer. During the multiple years long ramp from R&D to high volume manufacturing in the nanoelectronics market there are revenue opportunities greater than $100M available. Aligned Carbon is positioned to capture this growing R&D market and secure its valuable position as a high volume supplier in the $500B semiconductor industry.

Aligned Carbon was formed in early 2018 by three friends and labmates from Stanford University. Collectively Aligned Carbon’s team represents over 35 years of nanotechnology experience with 100+ peer reviewed publications and inventorship for 15+ patents. Cara Beasley, Greg Pitner, and J Provine were all members of Prof. Philip Wong’s nanoelectronics group. Cara received her PhD in chemistry at Stanford, then worked for 4+ years in the CTO’s office at Applied Materials. Cara then founded a startup company to revolutionize carbon nanotube materials through improved growth methods before joining forces with Aligned Carbon. Greg has defended his PhD thesis in electrical engineering focused on carbon nanotube growth and high performance transistors. Throughout his academic career, Greg has held internships with IBM and imec, and consulted with industry teams on device applications of carbon nanotubes. J completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Cornell and a post-doc at UC Berkeley, before spending a decade as a senior scientist at Stanford focused on nanotechnology and interfacial physics. While pursuing research and teaching at Stanford, J consulted with over a dozen companies from start-ups to industrial giants.